YouTube to Slay MTV?

The hugely popular site announced plans to post every music video ever made, and the blogosphere speculates it could become a serious competitor for MTV.

Earlier this week, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen announced plans to bring every music video ever made to the site (read more). The videos would be, like all YouTube clips, offered free to users, who would also be able to add the videos to their profiles and post reviews. The blogosphere is understandably buzzing over the news, with some fans of the site oozing excitement about the developments and skeptics suggesting it’s all a pipe dream.

Here’s what they’re saying on the interweb:

“This is awesome. Now hopefully it all remains free.” — CAPacelli, SPIN.com

“YouTube states it is committed to preventing copyright violation and [though they] remove offending material when they know about it, it remains a problem. Any day you can visit YouTube and find evidence of it. How can you monitor that sort of volume anyway? They serve over 100 million videos a day! This in the end may be the downfall of YouTube before we see any business model that rakes in cold hard cash. — globalgeek.thepodcastnetwork.com

“I think that it would be really awesome because I really enjoy watching music videos (since MTV doesn’t like showing them anymore unless you pony up the dough for digital cable), especially the older ones. Oh YouTube, when will you stop bringing joy to the masses?” — eptiger.blogspot.com

“Actually, I’m wondering if YouTube will do this — have all [those] music videos, and then as years go by, start showing less, and less music, and turn basically into a horrible glut of ‘reality T.V.’ like how MTV and VH1 did. I guess we’ll know the end is near, when YouTube announces it will carry all of The Real World episodes.” — cayenne8, slashdot.org

“Obviously the RIAA will try to license the content to YouTube for a huge fee. But even the record labels know that music videos are like advertisements for songs. They make far more money selling records than videos. Free videos give their music more exposure, which means more sales.” — truthsearch, slashdot.org

Talk: Do you think YouTube will really host every music video ever made? COMMENT

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